Author: Chris Krause

Twitter is an excellent example of the sort of technology that we can come to expect in Library 2.0 and the emerging culture of the industrialized world. In “Twitter: what’s all the chirping about?” Elia Ben-Ari makes a compelling argument case and portrait of this website which has revolutionized the way people communicate and interact. The author highlights the implications of the Twitter service as it contributes to an interconnected society where ideas and content can be created and shared seamlessly and effortlessly.

While many Twitter users “tweet” (or post) to update their friends of their daily adventures and minutiae, contributing to a personalized system of expression not constrained by mandatory viewing or participation, Ben-Ari reports that an increasing number of scientists and intellectuals are utilizing the service to exchange ideas and professional progress reports. The result is a population more cognizant of one another’s experience, contributing to more harmonious and effective workplaces and friendships. Twitter’s capacity to interface with mobile devices is noted for its ability to keep people connected even while in the most remote regions, as SMS technology uses substantially less bandwidth than internet access.

The author brings up an important point: Twitter has yet to adopt a mechanism for validating tweets on the basis of truthfulness. When the H1N1 scare struck, many users, panicked and ignorant, spread false information about the virus. While scientists did attempt to assuage fears by posting quality links and information snippets, there is no mechanism within the system to “up vote” or “thumb up” valuable tweets, and thus they were not spotlighted against the slew of misinformation. This speaks to an important point that Michael Stephens illustrates in “The Ongoing Web Revolution.” Stephens argues that an important component of sound Web 2.0 is “reputation… a way of knowing the status of other people in the system (Who’s a good citizen? Who can be trusted?).”

In this sense Twitter is perhaps deficient and may yet to be without flaw. In our industry we are guardians of knowledge and of truth, and without a means to differentiate between flimflam and good trusted sources, Twitter may not be an effective tool for librarians to reach the masses. There is an issue with complete freedom being granted to your userbase, as is the case with Twitter: anyone can pretend to be another, and information becomes relative, relegated to the domain of opinion. While this may prove nourishing as a means of interfacing with humanity for the purpose of socializing, this student is still wary of its widespread civic and corporate application.

Works Cited

Ben-Ari, E. (July-August 2009). Twitter: what’s all the chirping about?(BioBriefs)(twitter.com)(www.sciencebase.com)(http://tinyurl.com/d2acmr). BioScience, 59, 7. p.632(1). Retrieved September 01, 2009, from General OneFile via Gale:
http://find.galegroup.com/ips/start.do?prodId=IPS

The ongoing Web revolution.(Chapter 1). (Sept-Oct 2007). Library Technology Reports, 43, 5. p.10(5). Retrieved September 01, 2009, from General OneFile via Gale:
http://find.galegroup.com/ips/start.do?prodId=IPS

Two preoccupying topics of late have been friends and religion, first the latter.

It seems as I get older that I have less a tolerance for atheists and more of a general tolerance for the monotheists and other religious types. Even though this second group tends to be ignorant of the nature of the universe, they at least function with a baseline of morality, even if it is an accident of their creed. Through hundreds of years of apology, plagiarism of Stoicism and other accidental injections, Christianity, for instance, has in modern times mustered to teach a decent moral code – although not exceptional. At the risk of making a hasty generalization, Christians tend to be mild mannered, restrained and respectful, I do not immediately fear that I will be exposed to viciousness and vile acts in their presence.

In earlier years I was a firebrand against the Abrahamic religions, mainly because the metaphysics, logic and to a lesser extent, the moral maxims, of those systems tend to obfuscate the truth and to muddle man’s natural rational process, at times also weakening his willpower and self-esteem. As I get older, I realize that this still applies, but must remain as a caution to me alone, for the great majority of people are better off with religion than no religion. There is no substitute for an examined life, but if one lacks the inclination or ability to examine their life, as I suspect a great many people do, to create and act by a philosophy of life, then they are left with nothingness, a nothingness which they too readily fill with wasteful and self-defeating pleasures. As an aside, I must say that simply “giving” someone who has recently parted with the habits of religion a philosophy of life, even if it is of superior skill and wisdom, is nothing but an act of converting them to a new religion.

This leads me to my next point. While the most exemplary and moral people I have encountered have been principled and self-examining atheists, deists and pantheists, I would say, at fear of making a hasty generalization, that most without religion live degenerate lives. This is an ongoing dilemma for me, as with the rejection of religion also comes the reckless and destructive indulgence in food, drugs and sex. I have always seen through the futility of both projects: belief in absolutism, and hedonism. Yet all my friends are atheists, and lacking the rigor of philosophy in their lives, lead shadow lives which are incompatible with my esteem and dispositions. As it is, I stay around until the drugs and promiscuous eyes come out, which they inevitably do, and then I depart. But such a life is the life of a wolf, and loneliness is an all too familiar bedfellow. It is as if in rejecting the existence of a god they automatically reject all moral and physical restraints, tossing discretion and prudence to the wayside, considering all deliberative or ethical thought to be “bullshit.” How can such people be trusted to do the right thing? If they cannot, what use are they as friends? How can they be expected to raise and educate children? In this sense I am deeply worried about the future, which will inevitably be an atheistic world.

This is a matter of considerable cognitive dissonance for me, as the older I get, the less I am able to identify with my peers. At the core of my estrangement is my abstinence from drugs and promiscuous sex- which seems the way and good of life for the vast majority of the peers I encounter. I thought that age would temper what I hoped would be a high school-college phase of self-destruction, but many of them persist beyond their dorms, spending endless hours and nights in self-destructive binges. The years of intoxication and muddle have destroyed their imagination, creativity, reason and humor, reducing them to shells of what they once were. Even those who appear superficially healthy are at their cores deeply disturbed individuals, the extent of their dysfunction revealed by the intoxication of the poisons they ingest. I think ten times faster than they do, making me feel immediately bored in their presence, and when they do manage to produce coherent sentences, they have nothing wholesome to speak of, instead reveling in their own vices and tortures. They work to achieve the bare minimum, and fixate on feeding their endless bastion of want and desire. Again, these are generalizations, those of which I try to convince myself do not represent the case, yet my feelings are always reinforced whenever I let my guard down and let myself attend one their nightly destruction rituals. I wish I were greatly mislead, yet the truth is contrary. Why should I be expected to make friends with these people and why should I consider their behavior to be normal?

So I have come to slowly prefer Christians to these other folks. Christians tend to understand the innate value of life and of people, of love and of community. They are this country’s most common proprietors of the “golden rule,” basic moral teachings that are essential for the conduct of a human being. Rather than prostitute each other and preach to a cult of the lowest common denominator, the Christians have standards for their behavior. While the reasons for their behavior may be unexamined, the behavior in itself is nonetheless moral. While there are many pretend Christians, even the “gold cross” wearing variety are still influenced by a cultural lattice of ethical behavior. Ultimately, if you get a bunch of families and elders together in one place (a church) to discuss the good of life, the latter is the inevitable result.

And this is what is missing from the lives of my peers – any sort of community place, any sort of social responsibility or obligations. They live shadow lives, out of sight of their elders and parents, their church of congregation is the mall, where they worship the desires that encumber and entangle them. The only obligations for my peers are to themselves, and they accordingly wreck and ruin their way through life, trampling those in the way to their next best fix or purchase. Ayn Rand would be proud.

I was reading a back issue of the Health Affairs journal and came across this paragraph, which more than anything, clearly elucidates how I feel about wise law and the importance of philosopher kings. A solution is to have less laws, or at least, less restrictive laws, and more powerful judges and rulers, as long as the latter are virtuous they will see the complexities of what is laid before them and rule with justice and magnanimity.

***

As doctors we are restricted from helping those in pain at the end of their lives to end their own suffering.We are restricted from using marijuana to help those suffering from the nausea of chemotherapy.We run riskswhen using drugs “off label” for conditions that have proved to be remediable but for which the drug maker has neither sought nor received permission to list as a “use.” And we are asked to balance our moral position on these issues—and many others—against the possible legal consequences of acting in what we consider
to be our patients’ best interests. The laws that govern medical practice are not created by physicians or ethicists but by governments. Like most laws, they lack the ability to distinguish subtleties in the human experience that might require extraordinary interventions. Yet as physicians we must consider the needs of
each person and individualize our actions in our patients’ best interest.

So it is 1 AM and having eaten nothing of substance all day, the yearnings of the stomach finally inspire a raid on the meager cache of food left here for the 2 weeks Orcus and her dark company will be on vacation. Of this cache is included Marie Callender’s “Country Fried Chicken and Gravy.” To cook such food requires a microwave, more time than I expected and the ability to decipher contradictory and labyrinthine instructions. As I was standing by the microwave I began to inspect the packaging of this food item. In short, it is one of the most depressing things I have seen.

Where to begin? The thing that catches your attention first is the prominent scene on the back of a joyous grandmother and grandchild carefully making a homemade dinner from scratch. As if the picture wasn’t enough, the pretentious little logo under it informs us: “Food from the heart, made with love and care.” Are you fucking kidding me? Do you really think the shit that came out of the microwave really is supposed to make me feel as excited as the dinners my own grandmother used to prepare? The food is devoid of love and care, it is neither nourishing nor comforting, but just a tool to stop the hunger pains. Is this food supposed to have a moral aim, a Platonic aim? Is the packaging supposed to make us feel loved, as if we are worth the culinary efforts of a grandmother, or otherwise? Sitting alone in my room, forcing the non-food down my gullet, I had other thoughts.

Is the Marie Callender’s company comprised of guardians – doing what is best for their charges with wisdom and justice? Are we the wards of the company? The little “note” is signed “LOVE MARIE,” don’t you know? That got me thinking: there must be people out there that actually feel a connection with this packaging, otherwise it wouldn’t sell. There must be some poor bastard out there who wants to be loved through his food product, who estranged by kind or removed by mortality from his loved ones, yearns for surrogates. But it’s like a show of affection by someone who molested you – it is a tactic to deceive and dominate, it is not real love. For the Marie Callender company, to dominate your wallet.

I have been playing ARMA II recently and thought I would relate one experience which summarizes how open ended and strange this game can be. I was playing on a warfare map, in which two sides compete for control of various strategic hamlets across a vast Bohemian landscape. Each side has a commander, and the players are officers, capable of ordering other units under their command. As I was waiting for our commander to get things squared away, I was looking through the list of vehicles you can buy as a player. BRDM… T-72… UAZ… mountain bike! Hrmm I thought, lets take a mountain bike and try to solo capture one of the surrounding towns.

Then I realized, in this photorealistic world, this is what it must be like to bike in an environment where you don’t have to constantly be mad dogged by drug dealers, smell toxic fumes or constantly be preoccupied with dodging cars and a myriad of other filthy objects. Instead of my depressing suburban (and more urban everyday) sprawl, this was the Czech countryside, and it was beautiful. It was as if I could smell the flora and feel the wind on my face. If I knew biking could be like that, I probably wouldn’t be playing ARMA II in the first place. Herein lies one of the values, or if indulged too often, one of the dangers, of playing a well made video game: experiencing something when  it would otherwise be impossible. As long as it does not become a form of escapism, I believe this can only be experienced with such a great degree of verisimilitude through games. Driving around in full tactical gear, with an assault rifle and a rocket launcher strapped to my character’s back, I no longer really thought about combat, I just wanted to ride around aimlessly through the countryside and check stuff out. The developers added a Pee Wee Herman style horn to the bike which produced a pleasant jingle whenever it was used, creating an absurd scene to behold; a man fully clad in weapons, in a paramilitary uniform, tooting on his horn.

I approached the hamlet to be captured after passing through some beautiful fields adjacent to it and zipped through town, it was eerily quiet, and looked abandoned. Then I heard the not so distant thud of an automatic canon and read in the game log that a player on my team had been killed. Obviously, there was some sort of armored vehicle in the hay fields to the north. I rode north and spotted it, a BMP, an armored vehicle with an autocannon, firing with abandon onto a group of allies across the field, every few minutes firing a rocket across my field of view. Luckily, the BMP’s radar only picks up heat signatures of engines, so I quickly sped to a thicket of trees just fifty feet or so from it and dismounted, diving headfirst into the underbrush and brandishing my RPG. The BMP had not visually identified me, too busy firing on my friends, so I inserted a rocket into its rear, and from the massive plume of smoke and debris, several men stumbled out of the vehicle and died on the ground, right before me. I barely made out the fourth and final crewman, running at full speed away from the burning vehicle and out of view. After a tense game of cat and mouse, in which I slowly and carefully found him hiding in a nearby forest, he was dispatched.

I returned to my huffy, which had gotten itself stuck in some bushes and returned to the town toward the commander’s base, as he informed us that the hamlet had been captured and that he was now producing tanks for us to play around with. I heard a vehicle speeding down the road in the middle of town, and expecting it to be comrades also returning to base, I stopped to greet them. Yet what was coming was not friendly. As I waited in the middle of the road, a white 1970s camaro (no doubt commandeered from the local village) charged me, and as I expected it to stop, accelerated and knocked me ten feet off my bike, breaking both of my legs. I laughed so hard, I almost died. The car stopped, and the ENEMY COMMANDER jumped out and hid behind a little house. He poked his head around and popped off a few rounds at me, and as my legs were broken and I could not walk, I decided that the only way this was going to end up was with me dead. Accordingly, I threw a grenade at him, and it detonated mid air just as he came around the corner to finish me off. Not killed by the concussion, I finished him off with a few rounds of rifle fire. I was now stranded approximately 3 kilometers from base, I could not pedal my bike even if i wanted to (the tires were busted), and the car, which was intact when it stopped, had finally exploded after I threw the grenade. I began to crawl on my face back to the road heading to base, hoping to link up with some friends, when I realized that I might as well check the man who tried to kill me.

His gear was the standard US kit. An m-16, an AT-4, but something else caught my eye: green smoke grenade. Perhaps I could persuade the commander to airlift my ass to the MASH I thought, and I could mark my spot with the smoke. The plan was hatched, but as it stood, the commander only could speak broken English, and didn’t understand what I was saying. He was obviously German. After minimizing and translating I NEED A HELICOPTER TO SAVE ME, WILL USE SMOKE in altavista translator, the chap finally got the message, and commanded a player extraction team to get in a transport chopper and extract my feeble ass.  5 minutes later, I was crawling toward a clearing a few hundred feet from the street I was on and pulling myself up into the medivac.

The scope of this game is absurd.

Preserve life without loathing.
Awaken hope within hatred.
Wrest insight from outrage.

My house. The Kitchen.

Reanna: Let me use the fan in your room.

Me: No.

Reanna commences whining, answered by no.

Reanna runs to the window and waves to get her mother’s attention. Anything to get what she wants.

Reanna: Chris won’t let me use the fan in his room!

Something clicks in my head, one of my bananas was missing next to my keyboard. She broke into my room, stole a banana and used my fan when I was out.

I make pistol hand gestures toward her and pop my lips to fire at her, I imagine justice, my brother laughs and walks out to go back to work. He is used to this shit.

Reanna: Don’t do that – I want to be nice to you now [at least has the honest here to admit she is a tyrant usually], will you be nice to me?

Me: I don’t be nice to brats, you earn respect by giving respect.

Reanna: If i’m nice to you will you buy me stuff?

Me: No.

Reanna: Then nevermind… I HATE YOU.

Reanna runs back to watch her television.

Niko Bellic and his magical pockets.

Calculated the total weight that the main character of Grand Theft Auto IV (Niko Bellic) has on his person at any given time. It comes out to over 365 lbs, assuming:

600 rounds of 5.56 ammo, in 30 round standard magazines (.45 kg/ea)

m4a1 rifle (2.7 kg)

50 rounds of m82 ammo, in 5 10 round magazines (1.87 kg/ea)

m107/m82 rifle (12.9 kg)

8 PG-7v rockets (2.6 kg/ea)

RPG-7 (7 kg)

Baseball bat, assumed for a 180 lb man (.73 kg)

25 m67 fragmentation grenades (.4 kg/ea)

1500 .357 Desert Eagle ammo in 166 9 round magazines (.3 kg/ea)

Desert Eagle .357 (1.9 kg)

80 12 gauge buck rounds in 8 10 round bandoleers (.4 kg/ea)

m1014 shotgun (3.8 kg)

1200 9mm rounds in 40 30 round magazines (.6 kg/ea)

MP5 (2.9 kg)

Interceptor Body Armor with SAPI plates (7.4 kg) – this is a likely assumption, but is not represented as such in the game. Niko can carry body armor that is proofed against 7.62 ammunition, and since most of his other gear is US army issue, this would be the most plausible. He could also be using the outdated Flak Jacket, weighing in at 11.3 kg.

———–

165.68 kilograms // 365 lbs

One possible configuration of Niko Bellic’s gear – click on the image to enlarge.

Notes:

• The equipment is not to exact scale in the image.
• Niko can alternatively carry an AK-47 instead of the M4A1, which would add even more of a burden to his body.
• The recommend combat weight of combat gear for US soldiers is 50 lbs, which includes everything a soldier needs, not only weapons and ammo. The most extreme loads are seldom more than 135 lbs (and remember, this INCLUDES food, water, communication gear, camp gear and assorted kit). (source)

Show me a person who is sick and happy, in danger and happy, dying and happy,
in exile and happy, in disgrace and happy. Show that person to me for, by the gods,
I wish to see a Stoic. If you cannot show me such a one, at least show me one who
is forming, one who has shown a tendency to be a Stoic. Do me this favor. Do not
begrudge an old man seeing a sight which I have not yet seen.

Epictetus Discourses, Bk II, chapter 19

The study of the liberal arts is a necessary component in the education of a young person, as they inform the behavior and character of the civic enterprise. In particular, classical literature offers a wealth of wisdom in matters of living life with grace, virtue and authenticity. In an unattributed famous saying of Socrates the issue is elucidated succinctly: “Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.” Life is the proper laboratory to which we are given our final exam, and in matters of life, we might rightly wound those about us in ignorance of the knowledge of the good; we must caution against acting with imprudence and instead temper our inclinations and will with right principles. The liberal arts provide these principles by exposing us to a wealth of myth to contemplate upon and by offering to us a mental, even spiritual exercise (in the words of Pierre Hadot), by which to experience the spectrum of life and death, the range of human emotions. As a result of considering this mental meter, we are compelled to come to conclusions on the nature of life, and so gain wisdom, guiding our public and private behaviors while before we were naked in reasoning. The liberal arts challenge us, by thrusting upon us the transgressions of Oedipus and the destructive rage of Achilles, so that we might learn from vice, raise ourselves up from the mire and temper our actions with an understanding of consequence.

The question of whether or not the appreciation and training in visual arts should be necessarily educated in children is another issue. For sure, there is a need for visual artists, but there is not a need for all citizens to be visual artists in the same way that there is a need for all citizens to have a knowledge of right and wrong, of consequence and of civic duty. We might wisely offer to students with a love of beauty and form, those who hold some great innate yearning or talent in the arts, separate and specially suited instruction – but to impose on all students an instruction in the visual arts is ineffectual at best, and at worst compels students to revel in superficial and wasteful enterprises, enslaving them to the most superfluous aspects of civilization. For the citizens who have no interest in the arts, let us focus on teaching them how to act well, for action is the blood of life. As a corollary, we might recall that Plato warned against regarding the arts as true to life when in truth they simply mimic life and goodness; while they act as a glimpse at the truth, beauty or justice, they are not the authentic stuff. An obsession with false, pastiche forms is accompanied by a neglect of the most important and rightly apparent duties: the civic behavior. This notion is nowhere better pronounced than in Rousseau’s Discourse on the Arts of Sciences:

As for us, common men to whom heaven has not allotted such great talents and destined for so much glory, let us remain in our obscurity.  Let us not run after a reputation which would elude us and which, in the present state of things, would never give back to us what it would cost, even if we had all the qualifications to obtain it.  What good is it looking for our happiness in the opinion of others if we can find it in ourselves?  Let us leave to others the care of instructing people about their duties, and limit ourselves to carrying out our own well.  We do not need to know any more than this.